Anna Thompson

This is the small feature film that formed the integrated backdrop for the live performance/music piece. As abstract images and sound combine with the various stories and insights of the subjects interviewed, an illustration of memory is created. Seemingly unrelated video images merge with the images of the storytellers to create a common thread: the views of the Silent Minority.

Historian Michael Wood returns to his first great love, the Anglo-Saxon world, to reveal the origins of our literary heritage. Focusing on Beowulf and drawing on other Anglo-Saxon classics, he traces the birth of English poetry back to the Dark Ages. Travelling across the British Isles from East Anglia to Scotland and with the help of Nobel prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney, actor Julian Glover, local historians and enthusiasts, he brings the story and language of this iconic poem to life.

Vivian, Roe, JJ, Ines and a mysterious French man through a 20 year musical memory of New York City. As people and places in their lives drift away, visual impressions meld with sound and narrative stories to reveal a complex yet moving tableau. As the characters recall their own personal histories, conflicting images reveal their past, present and future.

Drawing on the richness of the good old days of cinema with live music and a thoroughly modern, “hyper-real” film experience with multiple screens and surround sound, The End of Cinematics examines the 21st-century phenomenon of viewing media content in fragmented form. From channel surfing to MTV to formulaic Hollywood films and sitcoms, we’re accustomed to—and adept at—filling in the details of storylines, of grasping an idea and determining its conclusion.